Final Destination
TWO CENTS | AUG 20, 2020
Final Destination
Long distance romance is sometimes best defined by the midway stop at Grand Central Terminal for a black-and-white cookie.
The black-and-white cookie has several claims to fame: New York City symbol, Seinfeld punchline, and contested territory when it comes to frosting texture. Unlike other sugary staples, it isn’t mentioned in the same breath as love and romance. In the popular imagination, Magnolia Bakery cupcakes got the sex and black-and-white cookies just got the city.
According to Eater, Bavarian immigrants John and Justine Glaser are credited with bringing the original recipe to their neighborhood on the Upper East Side nearly 120 years ago, and it hasn’t changed much since.
When I began dating my husband in 2018, I was living an hour north of New York City while he was in Bushwick. Altogether, our dates required at least two hours of travel in one direction by MetroNorth and subway. Grand Central Terminal became the gateway of our relationship, the star-spangled milestone that meant we were at least halfway to the other person’s arms.
These trips also meant a stop at Zaro’s bakery inside the station (Not to be confused with Zabar’s!) for a black-and-white cookie. I would buy one for my boyfriend and hide it inside my backpack, relishing the opportunity to surprise him with a treat. Zaro’s also sells a version with a very welcome addition: chocolate chips.
The Zaro’s black-and-white cookie is squarely in the fondant camp, with firm frosting that won’t smear the inside of your takeout bag. The hardened surface of the cookie takes on its own sheen, and if you look closely enough it even seems to glitter like the surface of the half-moon it is modeled on.
In all the times I stopped to buy my boyfriend a cookie, I never considered that moon was waning. It was always waxing, growing full with the possibility of being more deeply known. This intimacy comes with a risk, one that we baked into our origin story.
My husband and I met at a mutual friend’s apartment warming in Brooklyn. This friend lived above a bar called Duck Duck next to a tattoo parlor called Goose. That night we climbed out the fire escape window and up to the building’s roof. I still remember the way my husband looked silhouetted against the sky, muted by light pollution to a dull violet. Soon after, someone fell off the roof and nobody was allowed there anymore. This became part of our story too, that we had skirted danger. That we are always skirting danger in love.
It would be four years before we met again, dated for a year and a half and were engaged in February 2020. Then the world changed... drastically. I was laid off from my dream job, and our lives shrunk to the interior of our apartment. Grocery shopping became a fraught affair based on what was available, what wouldn’t perish, and what my fiancé could carry on his ten minute walk home.
One day, he came in the door after one such trip. As I began to sanitize the groceries he said, “I didn’t get everything I wanted but I got most of it.” Nestled in the bottom of one bag was a container of miniature black-and-white cookies.
Instead of the wedding I imagined leisurely planning over the next couple of years, we fast-tracked our nuptials so I could be covered by my husband’s health insurance. He saw this as the most important gift he could give me in the middle of a global pandemic, and our families readily agreed. However, the waiting list to have a civil ceremony in New York City stretched months into the future. We would move our quarantine from Brooklyn to my apartment north of the city and do the ceremony there.
It’s hard to describe how surreal this last trip was through Grand Central, carrying the garment bag with my future husband’s suit. The station was as quiet as a cathedral or a mausoleum and the Zaro’s display case contained nothing but a plastic loaf of challah.
My husband and I were married via Zoom, sitting side by side on my living room couch. Our local officiant ghosted at the last minute, so the ceremony was conducted by a friend quarantined in California. My husband headed to the post office immediately after our ceremony in order to overnight our marriage license to the officiant to sign.
The black-and-white cookie will never rise to the level of strawberries and champagne, but to me there is nothing more romantic than splitting one straight down its fondant seam. It is the patron dessert of lovers just passing through, and I’m happy to have finally arrived at my destination.
Daisy Alioto has written for New York Magazine, GQ, WSJ, Topic, Curbed, The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Food & Wine, and more. Daisy lives in the Hudson Valley.
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